The Sun vs. My Monitor: Winning the Glare War with Home Assistant

When working in my office during the day, I enjoy having my windows open to get as much natural light in as possible. However, this sometimes comes at a cost: glare. During certain times of the day, if there is little cloud cover, I get too much glare on my computer screen and it creates eye-strain, or makes reading difficult or distracting. So I took it upon myself to automate this problem away! This post outlines the process I took and how it works. ...

March 1, 2026 · 7 min · Ian Foster

ESPHome ESP32 Coredump Debugging

When developing with ESPHome on ESP32 devices, crashes can be frustrating to debug without proper stack traces. Enabling coredumps provides detailed crash information to help identify the root cause of issues. Configuration To enable coredump functionality, you’ll need to modify your ESPHome configuration and create a custom partition table. This setup is for the Arduino framework - ESP-IDF configurations will differ slightly. ESPHome Configuration Add the following to your ESPHome YAML configuration: ...

August 22, 2025 · 2 min · Ian Foster

ESPHome Components

ESPHome Components is a collection of custom components that extend ESPHome functionality for ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers. The repository contains C++ implementations of additional sensors, displays, and device integrations not available in the core ESPHome distribution. The components follow ESPHome’s standard architecture and configuration patterns, allowing them to be easily integrated into existing ESPHome projects through external component references. Each component includes the necessary C++ code and Python configuration validation.

October 4, 2021 · 1 min · Ian Foster

Programming Bare ESP-WROOM-02

A while ago I received a bunch of bare ESP-WROOM-02 chips on tape, but I could not find enough documentation to program them (partially out of laziness). With my recent interest in ESPHome, I decided to give them another try. This blog post contains the results of my research on how to program them. ESP-WROOM-02 The ESP-WROOM-02 is just a ESP8266 underneath. If you don’t have a breakout board like me, then you will need a UART adapter and make a few minimal solder connections to set the various boot modes to allow you to program the firmware. Once programmed for the first time, you can use OTA updates to allow flashing firmware over WiFi and not need to mess with the wiring every time you want to reprogram it. ...

January 20, 2021 · 4 min · Ian Foster